1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to a device for preparing and feeding liquid feed stuff for piglets and, more particularly, to a device capable of automatically preparing liquid feed stuff for piglets by appropriately mixing dry feed stuff with warm water, both being automatically supplied to the device at a predetermined time, and automatically feeding the resulting liquid feed stuff to piglets, thus improving the feeding effect for the weanling piglets, the device being also easily cleaned, thus preparing sanitary feed stuff rarely causing diseases in piglets.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The days after birth, when starting to wean piglets, have been desirably shortened in accordance pith a technical development in the swine industry.
Furthermore, a segregation early weaning process (SEW process) has been proposed and is in the early stages of being used practically. Such an SEW process is advantageous in that it somewhat radically protects the piglets from a vertical infection from mother pigs. Particularly, some experimental documents disclose that the piglets are almost completely protected from infectious gastroenteritis, Ozeski virus, P.R.R.S virus, pasteurellosis, atrophic rhinitis and etc. when the piglets are segregated from the mother pigs before 10 days after birth so as to initially wean the piglets through the SEW process. It is thus necessary to further reduce the days after birth when starting to wean piglets.
When segregating piglets before 10 days after birth to artificially feed the weanling piglets through the SEW process, it is necessary not only to consider that such piglets cannot completely digest dry feed stuff, but also to make the artificial feeding intervals meet with the natural intervals offered by mother pigs as explained in the following table 1.
TABLE 1 ______________________________________ Feeding intervals offered by mother pigs for their weanling piglets Time Weeks after birth (min.) 1 2 3 4 5 6 Avg. ______________________________________ Day 48 54 51 58 54 56 51 Night 39 46 53 52 56 60 51 Avg. 44 50 52 55 55 58 52 ______________________________________
From the above table, it is noted that in order to artificially wean and mother the piglets in an effective manner similar to that offered by mother pigs, it is necessary to prepare liquid feed stuff by appropriately and manually mixing dry feed stuff with water and manually feed the resulting feed stuff to the piglets twenty four times per day at regular intervals of 1 hour.
However, it is very difficult for farmers to perform such a regular and repeated artificial feeding function for piglets everyday, so that the farmers sometimes disregard the regular and repeated feeding work. This fails to accomplish a desired effect of such an SEW process, but causes a problem in that the weanling piglets may weaken.
That is, a desired effect of the SEW process for piglets has not been yet accomplished until consuming much labor and time and this remarkably reduces profitability of the swine industry. Such an SEW process is thus not widely used in hoggeries in the prior art.
The above-mentioned problems experienced in the SEW process also occur in feeding weakened or motherless piglets.
In an effort to overcome the above problems, several types of devices for preparing and feeding liquid feed stuff for piglets are proposed. Such devices are individually designed to supply dry feed stuff and cold water to a mixer through supply pipes prior to mixing the dry feed stuff with cold water into liquid feed stuff. Due to the low temperature of water, the dry feed stuff fails to be completely and uniformly mixed with water, thus partially lumping. Such liquid feed stuff with lumps is not suitable for being used for feeding piglets. Another problem of the above devices is that they fail to fully automatically and reliably prepare and feed liquid feed stuff for piglets at predetermined intervals so that the devices fail to radially overcome the problems experienced in the manual preparation and feeding of liquid feed stuff for piglets.
Furthermore, the above devices are expensive and fail to feed many piglets at the same time. Therefore, when needing to feed many piglets at the same time using the devices, it is necessary to install two or more devices in a hoggery and this forces greater expenses on swine farmers for the devices. The above devices are thus rarely used in hoggeries.